Welcome To The Hermit's Desk

The perfect storm

And it took less than two hours of that blissful morning entry I wrote when I woke up to have it all crash down on my shoulders.

Everyone around me talks. What should be voices are too shrill and breaks the violent, desperate quiet I've constructed around myself. If it breaks in, if anything breaks in, I break, too.

This disease has infected my soul and I cannot cut myself out. I can't separate the healthy tissue from what rots within. I can only hope to wrap it up tightly enough as to where nothing oozes from what's bandaged underneath. The only thing that could do that would be steel and I've none to construct such a dam around it.

I did not hurt myself. I did not drag a knife across my skin, which burned with wanting to be calmed by bleeding. I did not take my meds until the last second before I went back to bed, for fear I'd grasp the bottle and end up swallowing the whole thing. (Breaking the plastic bottle into pieces to swallow being optional, but I considered that, too.)

Or was I always this sick and this disease just scratched me half-an-inch under the surface, quickly bringing what sickness was always there, just waiting for an abrasion to seep through?

I did not hurt myself. It took Herculean efforts. So much white-knuckling. It has always been like this. Sitting on my hands, rocking back and forth, telling my head to just shut up, be quiet, go away, you're not right, you're lying, GO AWAY!

I know I'm supposed to be proud of this. It just makes me tired. Everything makes me tired, but little makes me as tired as fighting this does. People wildly underestimate the energy expended into not wounding yourself, acting as if you should feel just fine once the active urges pass.

We are not fine. We are still shaking, still shattered, and the fight is gone from us. Do not expect us to be up to talking, or to go the grocery store, because we are not sure that we are even still here.

I did not see myself at the age of 35 falling apart like this. I did not see myself so crazy at 35. I did not see myself walking the bottom of the ocean, churned and filled with monsters, at 35.

I did not expect to feel like such a failure - as someone who cannot handle herself for a few hours alone in the morning without wanting to leap off a bridge (be it real or metaphorical.) I did not expect to feel as if I am disappointing everyone around me simply by FEELING this way.

And that I am. Disappointing people. I am their sinking ship. I am their losing war. I am sick and never seem to get better. Their efforts of love and support slip through my own mind like a sieve, and I'll have no one but myself to blame when I find myself without anyone around me able to help me. Sometimes I think that would best.

To be alone with my own shallow, egotistical, obsessional suffering. To not make others stand witness to this, to me falling over and over again, each again rising more unsteady than the time before.

I lose perspective. I know, if I think about it logically, this can't last forever. But that's the lie mental health tells us, that it WILL, and it's hard to ignore the sirens of destruction when they fill the hours I can't sleep in. The endless hours wandering the apartment with a mind lacking in anything but clutter and noise.

I am so weak. Do not respond to this. Do not comment on this. I don't need to hear it. I don't want to hear it. It will break through this perfect storm and it will only increase the waves for me to tread through.